The Interpositive will be a "composite" of the picture and sound track, married together on the printer. It's during the interpositive process that color changes are applied as well. A few internegatives will be struck from the interpositive in order to make release prints. Quite a few prints can be struck from an internegative before it starts to fall apart. But of course, the best prints are made from a duplicate negative, which is really the highest quality composite source.

You mean original negative would be the highest quality source for a print -- you make prints either from the original negative or the dupe negative, you don't make prints from an interpositive, that would require some sort of reversal process to go positive to positive.

You mean original negative would be the highest quality source for a print -- you make prints either from the original negative or the dupe negative, you don't make prints from an interpositive, that would require some sort of reversal process to go positive to positive.

That surprises me. I have never heard from a European lab that the projection positives would not receive the soundtrack directly from the original sound negative which has been exposed after a master. We are used to have either the original camera negative or an internegative on the printer along with an original sound negative.

It used to be that the soundtrack was copied to the duplicate negative, but only for B&W and certainly not in the last fifty years or so. I see this configuration only on very old archive material in B&W from the 1950s or before. Currently all soundtracks are printed from a separate sound negative that can be used with the original negative (if suitable for printing) or from the duplicate negative. Friends in large labs told me they could strike about 2500 prints from one set of duplicate negatives.

A separate sound printer head is used because the exposure of the soundtrack is quite different from the picture. Also, light changes in the picture would do no good in the soundtrack.

I should have articulated that better I didn't mean to say that IP has sound on it as well (besides as Dirk mentions this archival style) rather the sound is printed after picture lock, before color timing etc, to a separate negative but at the same stage as IP.

I was waiting for a lab person to answer that, my understanding was that the optical track was added in a separate exposure pass but I wasn't sure if that was still true once they went from silver application tracks to cyan or high-magenta dye soundtracks...